On the outside
Nothing
wrong with the Santa Fe, which
plays it safe on the looks front. Take the badge off and most people would be
hard pressed to tell what it is.
Room & Practicality
The bar
is high in this segment and the Santa
Fe clears it with ease. I spent the first couple of days just being
impressed, listing nice little design touches that make life easier or safer.
For example, there’s two 12v sockets in the front and a USB/aux input. The 12v
sockets have a strong latch cover, the USB/aux input has a sliding cover and
all three are located next to a little storage area… and there’s a hidden, pale
blue light to illuminate the whole thing.
There’s
another 12v in the second row, and another in the cargo bay. There’s lights
behind the sunvisors, and more around the top of the doors. Front and rear
doors have two storage compartments. The glovebox is a decent size, and the
rear aircon can be independently controlled relative to the front. The cargo
system comes with a blind that retracts, and there’s two positions to place it
in. It is these sort of little touches that makes the Santa Fe so good.
The
rear tailgate is electric, which is one of those luxury items you don’t realise
you need until you use it. I’m sure back
in the day people said central locking was a waste of time, and which lazy
good-for-nothings needed electric mirrors or automatic transmissions. Fact is, we (the family) found the tailgate
useful. It is also auto-opening – all you need to do is stand close to the rear
of the car and it opens, after a short warning. Some other systems require you
to wave a foot under the car. The tailgate can also be manually triggered from
inside the vehicle.
The
list of niggles is not long, and mostly in the “could do better” category as
opposed to a fail. The centre console, while deep, is only a single compartment
although there is a tray. There is no
dedicated clock, so if the time isn’t displaying then you need to press a
button to show it – if I had to pick one annoyance with the Santa Fe, that’d be it. The
fuel release isn’t automatic when the car is unlocked, should be these days,
but of more importance the electric tailgate button is in the roof. People not familiar with the car will
struggle to find it, and that is one switch random people would need to press.
The
tailgate is one-piece not two, and that’s a personal preference but based on
many years of using test vehicles and talking to those that have owned
different styles, I do detect a preference for the split tailgate as in the
bigger Discovery and 200 Series. However, the single gate design does make a
handy umbrella, and easy access to the rear of the vehicle.
The Santa Fe has a keyless
security system. There’s a push-button start, and to lock the car you just
press a button on a doorhandle. To unlock, press the button again. You can also
use the remote to lock/unlock from a distance.
Summary
– busy families are going to love this car because it will make their life easier
in so many little but important ways.
On the inside
The Santa Fe is comfortably
spacious and practical. The driver’s seat on this top-end Highlander model is
8-way electrically adjustable, and the steering wheel is reach and tilt
adjustable so everyone should be able to find their perfect position.
Visibility is good in all directions.
The
60/40 split second row is a good place to be.
The rear seats on the Highlander can be heated or cooled, the seats
themselves can be moved forwards or backwards and the seat back tilt angle can
be changed. All three seats are usable
by adults, but naturally you’d prefer the two outer seats.
The
third-row is intelligent. It’s a 50/50 split, very important as often you just
need the one rear seat, and easy (and obvious) to operate. The seats fold down entirely flat. Legroom
for adults is good considering the size of the car, and that’s because you can
poke your toes under the second row. If
the occupants of the seats ahead are kind enough to move their seats forward
then there’s even more legroom, but that will do nothing about the headroom
which adults will tolerate only for short distances, although kids would be
fine.
There’s
usuable storage space behind the third row when the seats are in position, and
there’s also a compartment which stores the wheel changing kit. This is an
important point, because it means that you don’t need to unload everything to
change to a wheel. There’s also quite a bit of unused space in there which
would be great to store towing gear, first aid kits or whatever else you want
to keep in the car but don’t need all the time.
There
are four cargo tie-downs in the Santa
Fe but they look pretty feeble so I wouldn’t be using a ratchet strap on
them any time soon. The second row does fold down, but not entirely flat like
the Discovery or Pathfinder, which are larger and more expensive vehicles. Still, you could take pretty big objects in
there. The roof load is a reasonable 100kg, and there’s roofrails but no
crossbars.
Our
Highlander had a giant sunroof which partially opens. This makes the car very
light and spacious so is less of a frippery than you may imagine.
A nice
touch are additional sunscreens on the rear passenger windows, useful for
keeping the sun off small children, extra privacy or keeping the car cool.
Even
the rear seat pockets are strong and spacious. Note also the extra rear air-con
vent. The muddy mat is our own, not a standard part!
Performance, Ride & Handling
The Santa Fe
accelerates surprisingly briskly and pleasingly smoothly, then on the way back
down the brakes are feelsome and reassuring.
The automatic has no sports mode but doesn’t need one as it’s clever
enough to be in the right gear at the right time anyway. There’s a manual shift
should you want it which is going to be almost never.
Then we
come to the corners, where the Santa Fe manages to
be both boring and impressive.
Impressive because the car can be driven far more rapidly than its looks
or market segment would suggest, able to enter corners and hold lines with
surprising balance and control. The
reason is clever electronics – you can feel the car’s computer making tiny
adjustments here and there to keep the car on a perfect line, flattering the
driver. The front-drive bias of the
drivetrain comes to the fore here as well, you can feel the car pulling through
the front wheels.
It is
all rather boring because it’s so easy and unrewarding, but the Santa Fe is
never designed as a sportscar, just to be a very competent, effortless onroad
drive which is certainly a goal Hyundai
has achieved. A common bugbear with
impatient drivers of automatic turbodiesels is slow initial acceleration, but
this car is quick off the line. If
you’re late for the school run it won’t be this car’s fault.
Ride is
good, on the floaty side for some people but very few will complain. It’s good over rough roads too, poised,
controllable and capable.
There
are three modes of steering – Comfort, Normal and Sport – as usual, this only
changes the feel-weight of the steering wheel so it’s a personal preference.
Offroad
performance has been covered in detail in this blog post.
The Santa Fe will help you
parallel-park itself, and on test we found this feature to be easy to use and
work well. It has a handy Auto-Hold
feature; press the button, drive and when you come to a stop the car will hold
itself on the brake, uphill or downhill.
To move off just accelerate. This
is definitely handy in stop/start traffic.
The park
brake is electronic and operated by an easy finger-touch. As usual with such things you can simply
drive off and it deactivates, no need to manually deactivate it.
Towing
is 2000kg braked, but as with any vehicle and especially this class of softroader
you’d be very wise to invest in heavier-duty suspension if you wanted to
regularly tow up to around that figure. Hyundai had a Tow Pack for
their previous model, but it’s not available this time around.
Quality
Excellent.
Nothing seems flimsy, everything worked, trims looks reasonably hard
wearing. After a rather muddy, snowy,
rainy and dirty weekend the kids and I spent an hour on the car which brought
it back to a pretty reasonable condition considered we’d lived out of it for
two days.
Pricing & Equipment
All
Santa Fes are now 7-seaters, and they start from $38,490 MSRP for the Active
manual 2.4L petrol, ranging to $53,240 for our test car, the range-topping
Highlander 2.2 diesel automatic. Value
on this model isn’t bad, but the Elite at $10k cheaper for not much less
equipment is probably a sweeter deal.
Resale is improving on Hyundais as Australia realises just how good
these cars are.
Safety
There
are three child restraint points in the rear of the seats, where they should
be, and ISOFIX points all round. Safety
is of course 5 star with a 35.63 rating of 37, pretty good going and that was a
2014 test. However, there’s no AEB even
on the top-spec Highlander.
There’s
hidden little touches – if you start the engine with the wheels turned the dash
will flash up “Align Steering” before you move off. If you attempt to drive off with the tailgate
open the car will apply the parkbrake and warn you – I tried this during the
internals photoshoot which is how I discovered the feature.
The
Santa Fe sports a full-sized spare which is truly excellent news, unlike most
of its peers. That alone should put the car high up on shopping lists as you
try working with a runflat or space-saver midway into a weekend out of town.
This
Highlander model has a lane departure warning system which, like most of them,
is rather average and prone to false positives.
It’s best left disabled.
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